Carbon dioxide is produced when burning any hydrocarbon fuel. Additional carbon dioxide is produced by the chemical industry when hydrocarbons are used as feedstocks for catalytic steam reforming, partial oxidation and water gas shift reaction processes to manufacture hydrogen-containing synthesis gas. Little has changed in the last 50 years and almost all this carbon dioxide finds its way into the atmosphere. In recent years, carbon dioxide has been identified as a contributor to global climate change. Governments and corporations have proposed many methods to reduce or manage atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions. Furthermore, major efforts have been mounted to produce hydrogen more economically, since it burns cleanly, producing only water (as steam) and heat as combustion products. All approaches to move toward environmentally friendly fuels entail great complexity and expense.
The only way to completely eliminate the production of carbon dioxide when combusting hydrocarbons would be to:                1. Apply heat to hydrocarbons to cause decomposition to elemental carbon and molecular hydrogen;        2. Separate the hydrogen and carbon; and        3. Either burn the hydrogen with air or oxygen forming high temperature steam as a useful source of heat or electrochemically convert the hydrogen into water and electricity in a fuel cell.        
In such processes, the heating value of carbon combustion would be unrealized as useful heat. This loss of carbon heating value would nominally require twice the fuel to produce a given amount of hydrogen or process heat. However, carbon solids recovered in the process could be marketed or stored (sequestered) much more economically than by ‘end-of-the-process’ capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide.
Accordingly, a need exists for a method and apparatus to produce hydrogen in an efficient manner with limited carbon dioxide emission.